Headstone hunting, Savannah edition

If you like walking through cemeteries looking at headstones, consider joining FindAGrave.com. Its main purpose is to locate the final resting places of the dearly departed. But if you would like a photo of Uncle Ben’s headstone and are nowhere near his grave, you can post a photo request on FindAGrave and maybe, just maybe, someone like me will fulfill the request for you.

I found myself with a couple of spare hours yesterday in Savannah, so I took a look to see what photo requests were extant for cemeteries in or near Savannah. Much to my surprise, there were 10 photo requests for the Colonial Park Cemetery, a colonial cemetery right in the heart of Savannah. I saw my opportunity and I took it.

This cemetery was one of the rare ones that has a full plot plan that can be downloaded as a PDF. Good thing, too, as I never would have found the graves without it. The problem is that most of the headstones in this cemetery are more than 200 years old and most are sandstone, meaning that there is not much left of the inscriptions after 2 centuries of weathering. But with plot plan in hand I was able to track down and photograph 5 of the graves for which photo requests had been posted. I uploaded the photos and marked each request as “fulfilled.”

And I felt damn good about it. You might say that I felt fulfilled, too.

[NOTE: When the inscription is hard to read it sometimes helps to wet it to increase the contrast. I did this on the stone in the photo. I was looking for “Mary Flournoy” and could make out – barely – the “Flournoy”. But I wet the stone to get a better view of the first name. What I found was a barely legible “Mary” followed by “Willis.” When I returned to FindAGrave I found that the request was for “Mary Willis Flournoy.” Bingo!]